it has kissed.  And it intoxicates us by its appeal to so many sides of our nature at once.  We are thrilled, and we admire, and are almost coldly appreciative, and yet aglow with the response of the blood.  I have found myself applauding with tears in my eyes.  The feeling and the critical approval came together, hand in hand:  neither counteracted the other:  and I had to think twice, before I could remember how elaborate a science went to the making of that thrill which I had been almost cruelly enjoying.

The art of Rejane accepts things as they are, without selection or correction; unlike Duse, who chooses just those ways in which she shall be nature.  What one remembers are little homely details, in which the shadow, of some overpowering impulse gives a sombre beauty to what is common or ugly.  She renders the despair of the woman whose lover is leaving her by a single movement, the way in which she wipes her nose.  To her there is but one beauty, truth; and but one charm, energy.  Where nature has not chosen, she will not choose; she is content with whatever form emotion snatches for itself as it struggles into speech out of an untrained and unconscious body.  In “Sapho” she is the everyday “Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee,” and she has all the brutality and all the clinging warmth of the flesh; vice, if you will, but serious vice, vice plus passion.  Her sordid, gluttonous, instructed eyes, in which all the passions and all the vices have found a nest, speak their own language, almost without the need of words, throughout the play; the whole face suffers, exults, lies, despairs, with a homely sincerity which cuts more sharply than any stage emphasis.  She seems at every moment to throw away her chances of effect, of ordinary stage-effect; then, when the moment seems to have gone, and she has done nothing, you will find that the moment itself has penetrated you, that she has done nothing with genius.

Rejane can be vulgar, as nature is vulgar:  she has all the instincts of the human animal, of the animal woman, whom man will never quite civilise.  There is no doubt of it, nature lacks taste; and woman, who is so near to nature, lacks taste in the emotions.  Rejane, in “Sapho” or in “Zaza” for instance, is woman naked and shameless, loving and suffering with all her nerves and muscles, a gross, pitiable, horribly human thing, whose direct appeal, like that of a sick animal, seizes you by the throat at the instant in which it reaches your eyes and ears.  More than any actress she is the human animal without disguise or evasion; with all the instincts, all the natural cries and movements.  In “Sapho” or “Zaza” she speaks the language of the senses, no more; and her acting reminds you of all that you may possibly have forgotten of how the senses speak when they speak through an ignorant woman in love.  It is like an accusing confirmation of some of one’s guesses at truth, before the realities of the flesh and of the affections of the flesh.